Struggling, Suffering, Surviving -- And Winning

September 8, 1986|By David Broder, Washington Post Writers Group

WASHINGTON — Political reporters are supposed to keep their emotions in check, and usually that's no big problem. But when I woke up the other morning, flipped on the television, and saw John Lewis' face grinning in victory, I cheered.

If there is any person in U.S. politics who has paid his dues, worked, and struggled and suffered and survived, it is Atlanta's next congressman. When he beat the glittering state Sen. Julian Bond in the runoff primary for the Democratic nomination in Georgia's 5th District, it was a victory for all the infantry ''grunts'' in the world over the air force glamor boys.

It may also send a message about what voters value this year. Peter D. Hart, the Democratic pollster, has been saying that the best claim a candidate can make in 1986 is simply, ''I can make it work.'' Not ideology, not party label, just practicality and reliability are what the people seek -- and that is certainly what they will get in John Lewis.

I have nothing against Bond, but things have come awfully easily for him. He is handsome, articulate, engaging and polished. He achieved instant political martyrdom when the Georgia house refused to seat him 16 years ago, ostensibly because of his outspoken views against the Vietnam war.

That martyrdom made it appealing for some liberals at the 1972 Democratic convention to give him symbolic votes as the first black man in contention for a major-party vice-presidential nomination.

And from 1972 on, Bond has been a celebrity -- traveling the lecture circuit and the liberal cocktail parties, even when it sometimes kept him from his duties as a state senator.

Nothing has come easily for Lewis. I first met him in 1963 at the civil rights march on Washington, the 23-year-old head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, standing up to pressure from the elders of the movement to tone down what they saw as the inflammatory rhetoric of his speech.

He was jailed at least 40 times in that decade, hospitalized from brutal beatings in Selma and a dozen other battlegrounds. But he came away as devoid of bitterness as he was of ego or pretension and he moved into political action in the 1970s.

He tried for the same House seat in 1977 when Andrew Young gave it up to go to the United Nations, made it through a large primary field but lost the runoff to Wyche Fowler, a white liberal. Uncomplaining, he took an unglamorous job in the Carter administration and then went home to the unchic duties of an Atlanta city councilman.

In this race, Bond had the money, the endorsements of the Atlanta black establishment and the help of his glitzy friends from Georgetown to Hollywood. Lewis barely made it into a runoff, but then reversed the result of the first primary by cutting into Bond's margin among black voters and rolling up a big edge among the district's white voters.

The fact that he won only 40 percent of the black vote and 80 percent of the white vote in the runoff will be held against Lewis by some chauvinists in the community, but will not keep him from beating token Republican opposition in November.

Eddie Williams, the president of the Joint Center for Political Studies in Washington, a major center of research on black politics, said, ''The Atlanta establishment will drape itself around John now. They know there's no way he's going to turn his back on concerns of other blacks.''

Lewis' victory also reflects the reach of more and more black politicians for white support -- a ''rainbow coalition'' more realistic and less rhetorical than Jesse Jackson's version.

It is part of a great coalition-building tradition that is, in fact, the genius of the U.S. system. Lewis has understood that system even when it was raining blows on his head and frustrating his dreams.

He told me in 1979 that even in the darkest hours of the civil rights struggle, ''we felt somehow the American system was just, and that if we pressed hard enough and long enough and kept our means consistent with our ends, it would respond. . . .''

It will be a wonderful moment when John Lewis takes his oath of office in January as a member of the 100th Congress since the founding of this Republic.